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"By Jove there's old Murger's horse," he added "what a magnificent animal!" Looking up, the Nut saw Rissaldar-Major Shere Singh mounting the beautiful English hunter and also saw that he bore the number 66. Therefore the labels handed to him were obviously 99, and as 99 he tied on the 66 of Mr. Ross-Ellison who observed the fact.
So Henry Murger's first work, "La Vie de Bohême," was very popular; but it did not swell his purse or improve his wardrobe. He was introduced to me, and I shall never forget the low bow he made me. I was afraid for one moment that his bald head would fall between his legs. This precocious baldness gave to his delicate and sad face a singular physiognomy.
The attic, the studio, the restaurant, the café are the accepted symbols of Bohemia. What reader of Henri Murger's "Scenes de la Vie de Bohème" has ever forgotten the Café Momus, where the riotous behaviour of Marcel, Schaunard, Rodolphe, and Colline brought the proprietor to the verge of ruin?
Philip began to read Murger's fascinating, ill-written, absurd masterpiece, and fell at once under its spell. His soul danced with joy at that picture of starvation which is so good-humoured, of squalor which is so picturesque, of sordid love which is so romantic, of bathos which is so moving. Rodolphe and Mimi, Musette and Schaunard!
He looked not so much like a young old man as like an old young man. Henry Murger's warmest desire was to write in the celebrated and influential "Revue des Deux Mondes," which we all abuse so violently when we have reason to complain of it, and which has but to make a sign to us and we instantly fall into its arms. I was then on the best terms with the "Revue des Deux Mondes."
Puccini's music echoes the spirit of Murger's romance with marvellous sincerity. It paints the mingled joy and grief of Bohemian life in hues the most delicate and tender. Like Murger, though dealing with things often squalid and unlovely, he never forgets that he is an artist. The sordid facts of life are gilded by the rainbow colours of romance.
Had I done so, the glamour must have fled: I should still have been but Loudon Dodd; whereas now I was a Latin Quarter student, Murger's successor, living in flesh and blood the life of one of those romances I had loved to read, to re-read, and to dream over, among the woods of Muskegon. At this time we were all a little Murger-mad in the Latin Quarter.
Many of these Frenchmen were a queer lot. They seemed the very reincarnation of Murger's Bohemians, and evidently took all the discomforts and privations of their situation as a first-class joke.
For the delightful heroes and heroines of a whole range of fiction, from 'Manon Lescaut' down to Murger's 'Vie de Boheme, marriage did not apparently exist, even as a matter of argument. And as to the duties of the married woman, when she passed on to the canvas, the code was equally simple.
Henry Murger's gratitude, whenever we met, continued to exhale in enthusiastic hymns. I lost sight of him for some time. I was told that he lived somewhere in the Forest of Fontainebleau, to escape his creditors' pursuit. The next day, and every day the petty paper appeared, the joke was renewed with all sorts of variations. It was evidently a "rig" run on me.
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